The Strangers' Gallery (12 page)

Lately, he's been combing through the newly acquired papers of the St. John's Housing Corporation, which we thought had been lost. It was the first Crown Corporation in all of Canada, though of course it wasn't actually in Canada when it was incorporated. He's hot on the trail of Sir Brian Dunfield, a former Justice of the Supreme Court and the esteemed founder of the historic neighbourhood of Churchill Park. Acting on Anton's tip when he first arrived, I had confirmed in my preliminary research in these papers that I was living in one of the original houses, in what used to be known as “The Housing.” There is a photograph of Sir Brian in the files, circa 1946, standing in someone's kitchen—the cupboards look exactly like mine!—smoking a pipe, and chatting with a happy new homeowner.

As Sir Brian Dunfield's self-appointed, unofficial hagiographer, Colm intends to cast him in the utopian mould. He sees him as a socialist philosopher of some sort (his academic background was in philosophy), a philosopher who shared his sandwich. Sir Brian, Colm believes, may even have eclipsed Sir William Coaker, our great fishermen's union leader, in service to his fellow man. In the spring of 1942, in the middle of the war, Sir Brian was appointed chairman of the Commission of Enquiry into Housing and Town Planning in St. John's, a body set up to investigate the quality of housing in the city and to recommend a scheme for re-housing the poor and re-planning the city. The commission produced five reports in two years—surely a record. The third one Colm sees as a socialist manifesto, no less, not like Marx's revolutionary document exactly, but perhaps a Newfoundland version of Frederick Engels's
The Condition of the Working Class in England
.

The preliminary work I'd done on the genial Sir Brian Dunfield and the Housing Corporation I turned over to Colm when his interest became so piqued he could hardly contain himself. Enthusiasm like that should not be restrained. Some may view this as unseemly in an archivist or, indeed, in a scholar of any kind. Some would not even grace us with the word “scholar,” seeing us merely as custodians, record-keepers, high-class clerks. Clerk-scholars, perhaps? Colm, who reads all the discussions and debates in the latest archival journals, tells me that this matter of the traditional scholar-historian archivist versus the new clerk-technician is a much-debated topic these days.

I left the trail at Rennie's Mill Road, where the river, joined by Kelly's Brook, continues on to Quidi Vidi Lake, and then through Quidi Vidi Village to the sea. But instead of making my usual U-turn and heading west up the valley of Kelly's Brook, I turned east along Empire Avenue, then up a short laneway to Circular Road—the east end of Circular, between Rennie's Mill Road and King's Bridge Road, arguably, as they say, the most beautiful stretch of old houses in the city, most of them still in their original state. When people think of Circular Road, this is usually what they have in mind, but the west end of Circular is another story.

At that end there is an old brewery surrounded by much more modest houses, in one of which Elaine and I, when we were students, had what Holmes and Watson would have called
rooms
. We woke up each morning with the smell of hops in our noses and the sight of granules of soot on the ledges of the open windows. If it was windy, the soot was all over the place—on the floors, in the bedclothes, in the bathtub, on the kitchen table. Tractor trailers charging back and forth to the plant would discharge clouds of diesel smoke from the high exhaust pipes behind their cabs—right in through our second-storey windows, or right into our faces if we happened to be gazing out at the scenic brewery stacks.

At the top of the laneway was the house I was looking for, the number still fresh in my mind after rooting around all morning in the Vertical Files. It was a very ordinary-looking mansion as these Circular Road houses go. Here once lived a Knight of the Empire—the Silent Knight—Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, a man who gave a whole new meaning to the term “the Unknown Soldier.” Miles always referred to him as “Mr. Smokescreen.” In the file that we have on him, tissue-thin as it is, there are references to no fewer than five St. John's addresses: Circular Road, Churchill Park, Waterford Bridge Road, Military Road, and Orphanage Lane. When he first arrived, in 1925, he lived for a short time in Bonavista, on the northeast coast.

Evasive tactical manoeuvres on Sir Henry's part, perhaps, evidence for the view that he was in hiding from the IRA (his name and address, however, had been published in the St. John's telephone directory!) and that an IRA assassination squad had actually come to St. John's to find him.

I have been conscripted as a researcher by an English military historian at Sandhurst, a professor Ian Nowottny, who's writing a book called
Sir Henry Hugh Tudor: a Military Life
. Almost half that life—the non-military half—was spent here in Newfoundland. He lived among us for forty years, in fact, though hardly anyone knew who he was, why he was here, or even that he
was
here.

Sir Henry Hugh Tudor was, theoretically at least, the most powerful British military figure in Ireland during the fight for independence, though some historians doubt his actual authority and influence. He had served with distinction in the Boer War and the First World War. He was credited with the invention of the smokescreen, a military manoeuvre he describes vaingloriously in his self-published memoir,
The Fog of War
, the manuscript of which we have in the Archives.

I walked down the steep steps into the valley of Kelly's Brook, a buried brook for almost its entire course, all the way from the west end of the city to the east. Last year the final quarter mile or so, where it joins Rennie's River, had been disinterred, or “daylighted,” as it was described in the newspaper. Here the original waterway had been artificially recreated: a rock-lined, gravel-covered stream bed with crooks and meanders and “riffling rocks,” alders and bulrushes. But the new stream bed had turned a rusty red, since most of the brook, which is even longer than Rennie's River, is still buried in a fifty-year-old steel pipe that serves as a storm sewer. A few miles up the valley it runs past the old city dump, now buried as well, but never cleaned up.

Sir Brian Dunfield's 1942 Housing Commission socialist manifesto had pointed out that 80 percent of the houses of the poor had no toilets, no indoor plumbing, no running water. People used to bathe and wash their clothes in Kelly's Brook until it became a health hazard and they were ordered to stop. The neighbourhood children then took to warning the sailors from the Portuguese White Fleet not to bathe or wash their clothes in it. Finally, “Stinky Brook,” as the children called it, was buried in a pipe.

Farther up the valley, smoke was pouring out of the large barbecue hut next to the Elks Club, and not just up through the tin chimneys, but from under the open eaves, and out through the cut-out doors and windows. When I passed by, there were Elks out on the asphalt, all bulls, some with bottles of beer in their hands, some bent over, coughing and slapping their thighs. They must have been distracted by something and left the steaks unattended on the charcoal grills. There was so much smoke now that no one could get back inside.

Through the large bow window of the clubhouse I could see women, and a few children, laying long tables with white tablecloths, cutlery, and flowers; other women came rushing out to see to the coughing men. There was a tragicomic and nostalgic residue of tenderness in this scene, this sepia-print of the old order, the clear, secure, but now politically incorrect, division of labour: the women inside the house tending the tables and the children; the men outside with the beer and barbecues, the hearth in the garden giving them the opportunity to adopt the traditional cooking role. But no one is feeling tender anymore.

Into the Elks Club parking lot, however, came another hopeful pair—as I said, the most incurable of the human virtues—in the conventional white convertible, followed by a long line of honking cars. It was a marriage feast that was being prepared, and a lovely bride of a day they had for it.

I walked on, wondering how they got to build this clubhouse right in the middle of “the valley,” as this particular green space, playground, and unofficial public park was called. Perhaps, like the old brewery looming above it, it was here before the park and the houses below “the Old Track,” the old railway line, were built, before Kelly's Brook was covered in. As I passed the raised manhole cover above the steel pipe, I could hear the water rushing, dark and angry, beneath my feet. Buried or not, I thought, a river or a brook is as much a living thing as a woman or a man.

Farther up the trail, not far from where it entered a short stretch of trees and a side path turned off and led up to my street, a man and a woman appeared suddenly out of the trees, the man in the lead, walking fast and swinging his arms, looking as if he wanted to leave the woman behind. He was naked from the waist up, his shiny black hair reflecting the sun. It was slicked back flat and parted right in the middle. He was wearing black dress pants and black shoes and carrying a white shirt bunched up in his hand. There were tattoos on his arms and chest. The woman was wearing high heels and having trouble keeping up on the gravel path. She had long orange-yellow hair and was wearing a white, flouncy semi-formal dress well above her knees. When she reached the point where the path widened and the sides had been mowed, she removed her shoes and began to walk barefoot on the grass, trying to catch up.

Not walkers or hikers, that's for sure; more like drivers who'd had to abandon their car. Heading to the wedding reception, I guessed, but not looking very receptive, looking very mad at each other, in fact, or at the world. The sun was at their backs, and they both glared sullenly at me as they passed; but I was staring into the sun without my sunglasses—my face scrunched up, my eyes narrowed—and they might simply have been returning what they saw as an unfriendly look. After my long walk on the trail, however, my heart was as light as a bridegroom's. I held them with my glittering eyes for the briefest of moments—neither of us nodded or spoke—and though they looked to be in the most unfestive of moods, and might not have minded being delayed, I made no move to hold them with my skinny hand, to impede their progress toward the marriage feast.

Never talk to strangers with tattoos, my mother used to say, reciting it, intoning it, in a formal sort of way. I used to think it was a proverb.

7. LORD AMULREE'S NEWFOUNDLAND DOG

They were right…
all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all…

—W. H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”

T
o borrow a
few words from the Great Gibbon—he can certainly spare a few—from his
Memoirs
, I believe, not the monumental
Decline and Fall:
It was at St. John's, in the former country of Newfoundland, on the 15th of October, 1982, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the fountain in the courtyard of the Colonial Building (if you'll excuse the common attribution)—the House,
La Malcontenta
—while the sneakered urchins were screeching and running through the fountain spray, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the country, by way of a Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds, first started to my mind.

It was early evening, Miles himself was sitting on the bench beside me—I had known him for about five years by then—and, needless to say, the decline and fall of the country was never far from his mind. He had just finished telling me that the inscription on the fountain,
now difficult to make out because everything was covered with mud and dust, was taken from one of the incendiary political pamphlets of Dr. William Carson.
Elections are fountains from whence flows the purity of parliaments,
it read, but it seems that “the Founding Father,” as Miles calls him, was not pure enough to get elected to the first Newfoundland parliament and was now turning over in an obscure grave.

“I bet not one of our elected members, or the
hisstorians
—here was a sibilant gift horse that he never looked in the mouth—could tell you where it is,” he said.

I knew exactly where it was because Miles had never allowed me to walk past it without genuflecting, had led me to it like a child being taught the formalities of grief, the obligatory respect due a deceased parent, any time we had taken a walk downtown. Carson's grave was in an obscure corner of the churchyard of the Anglican Cathedral on Church Hill, and as long as there wasn't snow on the ground, Miles would always take the time to scratch around like an old hen among the thick grass and weeds of this ancient cemetery, now unused, to find a few wildflowers to lay by the stone.

The Colonial Building fountain was erected in 1956—a year late, Miles reminded me—to celebrate one hundred years of so-called responsible government, granted in 1855.

“Nothing but chaos and conflict up to that point,” he said. “Not that our first government was irresponsible. As Prowse said, the Constitution of 1832 was a ‘veritable political Frankenstein…a constitutional creature that looked as if it had been deliberately designed not to work.' The men who had fought for self-government, and who had been elected by the people, were in the Lower House, and the ones who had opposed it, and who had been appointed by the Crown, were in the Upper House—a ‘Colonial House of Lords,' Prowse called it.”

The commemorative fountain was now disintegrating, however, and was being dismantled and removed, and Carson's symbolic fountain—the franchise—from which had flowed the parliaments of the country of Newfoundland for more than one hundred years, the country that he and other reformers had founded, had been officially removed in February 1934. The country's parliaments would never flow from that fountain again.

In February 1984, as the fiftieth anniversary of this tragic historic event drew near, Miles wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, published in the
Evening Telegram
, asking for a public apology from the British government for the disgrace it had inflicted upon us—and upon itself—and for “posthumous diplomatic recognition,” as he called it. Needless to say, he never received a reply, at least not from Mrs. Thatcher.

If, in October of 1982, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the fountain in the courtyard of the Colonial Building, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the country by way of a Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds had seemed a mere quixotic notion, by October of 1984, as I sat musing under the apple tree on a bench on Toulinguet Close, in the unexpected warmth of an Indian summer, this notion had blossomed into a Bosworthian obsession. Miles was sitting on the bench beside me once again.

“Miss Georgie was
thirty-four
years old when she lost her voice,” he was saying—he always referred to Marie Toulinguet, or Georgina Stirling, as Miss Georgie, as if she might have been a favoured niece—“and she died
thirty-four
years later, the year after her native land lost its own voice—
1934,
as you know. But did you know that the Newfoundland wolf—a unique species, I've been told—became extinct that same year?”

“No, I didn't,” I said, as gravely as I could.

Miles saw all these numbers and fates as signs. He was now always on the lookout for signs, for Recognitions, ever since he'd read that anonymous letter in the paper—though he would never admit this, of course—in response to his open letter to Margaret Thatcher.

No doubt this was a lot of symbolic weight to place on one woman's shoulders, but not as much as Miles had loaded onto the weak back and the missing feet—the result of a serious rugby injury—of the traitorous politician Frederick Alderdice. That the last prime minister of Newfoundland literally didn't have a foot to stand on was a little-known fact that Miles had discovered in a collection of “letters home” in the Commission of Government Fonds in the provincial archives at the Colonial Building. “He has no feet and only one leg,” wrote chief commissioner Sir John Hope-Simpson.

That the poor, demoralized Newfoundland state, in the symbolic personage of our last prime minister, hadn't had a foot to stand on was surely the final missing piece of Miles's personal zodiac of inauspicious signs; the final Aristotelian Recognition in the tragedy that was Newfoundland history—his Newfoundland history, at least—the one that had settled the case for him once and for all. For days after this great archival discovery, a certain lingering amazement was still evident, as if he had been up till sunrise on the roof of the House and had finally seen the zodiacal light—or had just returned from a personal consultation with the Auspices.

For the first eight months of 1984, I had been seconded to work down at the government archives, and Miles seemed to have followed me down. That ill-omened year, as his hero Orwell had prophesied, arrived with more than its share of signs, omens, and Recognitions. Miles knew his Aristotle—and his Greek tragedy. He had taught the interdepartmental offering, Classics in Translation, for twenty-five years in “the British department of the Old Colony Club,” as he once referred to the English department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where a British Lord, hand-picked by Premier Smallwood himself, had been appointed president as late as 1967. And in 1984, the Muses, or the Fates, seemed to have hand-picked Miles for the role of Aeschylus's Watchman on the Roof, waiting for “a new star, the promised sign.” Of what, I can't remember—the fall of Troy?—and maybe it was no longer clear to Miles.

By summer's end, however, all he had seen so far from the roof of the House—literally and figuratively—was Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest in the heavens, constellation Canis Major.

“O gods! Grant me release from this long weary watch,” said the Watchman.

As a seconded temporary employee, I had access to every nook and cranny of the building, every closed room, gallery, stairway, basement vault, and attic space, and Miles would ask for a personal tour at least once a month.

“The house itself, could it take voice, might speak aloud and plain,” said the Watchman.

In the attic, whose ceiling was still charred from a lightning or chimney fire many years before, he would climb up the long ladder and open the hatch to the roof, which had a spectacular view of the Narrows.

“You go on back to work,” he'd say, then disappear through the hatch. I'd have to go up and get him at the end of the day.

On one occasion, however, I forgot all about him, and left him in the building overnight. Perhaps he had stayed up on the roof—it was a warm summer night—still watching for the new star, the promised sign. Or perhaps he had spent the night wandering through the building
looking for the ghosts of what he called the godforsaken Gang of 27, the traitorous last Members of the House, who had, without a single dissenting voice, voted the country out of existence and were surely doomed to wander the halls and stairways of
La Malcontenta
till the end of time, repenting, seeking forgiveness—but woe betide those who sought it from him.

In the morning, I found him asleep on the couch in my office with an empty mickey of whisky beside him on the floor.

“I speak to those who understand,” said the Watchman, “but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.”

Spent all day on the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds. Well…not officially a
fonds
yet, but certain to be one, it's just a matter of time, under the rubric of “personal archives.” Right now, it's just a rogue vertical file, but with a wily, dedicated filer. Yours, as they say, truly. “My
life
is a fonds,” as one of my colleagues likes to say.

Though just a po-mo, fringe-fest notion to most archivists—a very conservative lot—the creation of a so-called total archive, comprising a broader, more idiosyncratic, more representative repository of personal records, is now being enthusiastically advanced by the progressive conservative cell in our own archival journal. A total archive would contain “the flotsam of the individual life,” give “glimpses of the inner soul,” document “our complex inner humanity,” and be “more of an archives of character than of achievement,” as one of these enthusiasts has put it. This will counteract the stultifying emphasis on government and other institutional records—legal, corporate, and ecclesiastical—and on the personal fonds only of high achievers, pursuers of fame and fortune.

I have to agree. What of the unfortunate and unknown? Is there no room at the archival inn for them?

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries…

Of late, in pursuit of one personal archive in particular, I've heard more than a few bootless cries.

Archives, our po-mo theorists insist, must be a choir of multivarious voices, including those who can't sing, a book of multiple narratives, not excluding those who can't write: the voices and stories of underachievers, losers, and cranks; the marginalized and the dispossessed; the proverbial voices crying in the wilderness; the erratics carried along by the great indifferent glacier of history and dumped like foundlings at our feet.

You could think of Newfoundland itself as an erratic, I suppose—bits of Dr. Piercey's geology lecture were still drifting back to me—an orphaned land mass, a geological foundling, like our rejected foundling father. It was left on the doorstep of the North American continent when the supercontinent, the geological fatherland of Pangaea, “all lands,” the entire continental crust of the earth, broke apart over two hundred million years ago, and the various segments, the so-called tectonic plates, began their continental drift on the Seven Seas.